Hi there!!

Today I was thinking about one of my characters. I always love the Steampunk and Cyberpunk themes, maybe because I'm a 80's generation (the best haha).
Well one day I was looking for some inspiration and found an amazing Steampunk golem design by Emerson Tung. I love the work of this man. I recommend see his work because It's amazing. 

It's not finish yet. For the head I wanted make a tribute to Warhammer 40K so I made an Space Marine helmet ha! ;) 
 
Although it's harder, I love make asymmetric characters for two reasons. First it's a challenge 'cause you can't use symmetric tools so I think it's more artisan. The second reason it's I think that have a better appearance... I don't know....maybe it's a optical effect but I always try to make a  asymmetrical characters.

This another character. It's a really lowpoly base mesh, but as you can see she's asymmetrical too. This one soon be leaving to Zbrush. I promise show you when I finished.

See you !!




 

Hi everyone !!

Yesterday, here in London, we have a really beautiful morning, so I went to Victoria park to take some pictures to make textures.
For me it's really important that if I use photographs, that no lights and shadows. It's important that has a neutral light, and always make the shoot in RAW because later I can manipulate parameters.

Here's the first picture. It's a Birch tree (I love the Birch bark because is  really easy to identificate and it's easy link Birch tree with beatifull nature):

First I make picture power of two (It's really important that if you use the texture in UDK be power of two) and remove the elements that are too unique for make a neutral texture. So now I can be a tilelable texture:

As you can see, there's different light and color areas so I work on it to make continuous and neutral all texture. There the result tiled 2x2:

Ok. But it a little bit bored, so make more interest texture. First, normally the bark trees have moss or lichen, so go on. I use a contrast blue channel to make a mask and then blend a moss texture:

Oks, not bad but it's a little bit plane. I work on each map separately and make a AO map. Later mix both maps and multiply with the difuse:

Much better. This map (AO) will be stored in blue channel of normal map.Why? Two reasons. First one, as I said in the last post, save memory. But... why not multiply now and make a difuse map with the AO baked? well... I can do this but, if I keep separately, inside UDK I can manipulate so for me it's better.


Final texture it's two 512x512 DXT1 textures (one for the difuse and the other for the normal and AO) really memory cheap:

Wall Piece

Hi there !!

Today I started my new demo reel. It will have two pieces (o maybe three): A cave as a inner, and a mountain-forest village as outside. I want both to experiment with lights and specially with cube or spherical environment maps.
So here I am. Today I made a rocky cliff piece. I started modelling a hi-poly on Zbrush.

I prefer export this model to 3D Max using Decimation Master and use the same mesh to make a Low-poly model with pro optimizer. It really save a lot of time!!. Then I unwrap this low-poly model and bake normal map. Other people likes unwrap directly in Zbrush... well... it's a matter of taste.
Now come the ambient occlusion to get detail to diffuse map. I always use Vray (I love it, thanks Chaos Group!!) to make a good AO map. For this, I use Vray light material with Vray Dirt Map.
Then in photoshop mix my normal map with the normal map that I get to the difusse map (with NDO2, crazybump, pixplant,...) For a best AO mix the blue channels from this normal with my Vray AO. And this is the result:

So this is my base. Now I use UDK to make details and make a really good normal map. For save memory I always clean the blue channel of the normal map and put there my AO map, so I have normal and AO map in the same picture without alpha channel (I always use a DXT3 maps to keep low my memory footprint and reduce engine memory calls).
And  final result in UDK is this:

Now use vertex paint to bland textures,one for the surface, and this for the rocks.
So I hope that like you

See you in space !!

The journey begins...

Hi everybody!!

How's thing?. Today I start a new blog about the 3D and computer graphics. I try to be a environmental artist, so I will work hard and make it happen...

But first a little about me...

My Name is Gorka Sanchez. I'm from Spain but I've move to London to improve (well... in fact to learn) my English and my formation as a 3D artist.
I always want to be a 3D artist but I never had the chance because I started in aircraft industry. But one day two years ago said "come on...or now or never" and started my formation as a 3D artist and I'm here.

Why a 3D artist?, well...It's easy to explain but I'm not sure if it's easy to understand. In my case... to create worlds.
When I was a child and played video games like Flashback: quest for identity or The legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, (for me, two of the best games in history) and walk for these worlds, always thought "It must be great be there and live those adventures"

And that brings me to this point and to this blog. I try to make worlds for you and everybody. And will be great, you will see !! You can help me with your opinion (no matter if you know 3D or not, both opinions are important)

So let's go!!